“Blueshift”

And this time I dig deep into my heart To dredge up black bitterness Oily, and tainting. Coating everything it touches With a metallic tang Like the air in a stale room So unpleasant it won’t let you forget And the tiny-stilted shivers of fear rest on your skin, Thankfully stilled Laid carefully over you like paper-mache- To cover with neglect and time. Shreds of damp newspaper, Forgotten bandages Like elephant skin Sodden and falling to pieces If you move. And the skeletons are scratching Against the sunlit walls again, up in the attic. An eerie, airy noise, like distant traffic Or a redox Of packed-in grainy echoes in a box Rebounding off the floor; Like the silence in the theatre After the final chords When the ghosts of notes Fall fragilely and are drowned In the torrent of clapping. There is nothing that this is like.

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ENTRY #????

I’ve spent so much time perfecting this keep that now I am locked in. So much time defending that I’ve forgotten to question if there’s anything there any more, what I’m for. I’m not for anything, only against. Just negative space that I defend with everything in me, without knowing why. The right to exist for a questionable, vague life too complex to be worth comprehending.

I am compacted—if I move from this crunched space I will break, I cannot re-expand. One way trip, splicing up two-by-fours just to be able to breathe, frantically painting myself into a corner. Who cares about artistry, I’m just trying to get away from the advancing tide. First two feet, then one foot on the ground, hiked up against the corner. Like being inside a letter box, a papered cubbyhole—all the walls covered in writing, signed in blue blood. Footnotes upon footnotes to be read by scholars after those in the Tower are executed. Whose bones lie?

Definitely all your fault. Like a typewriter without the inky finger-staining ribbon, no punched-out stars. It leaves no mark, just a clickety-clack symphony. All your fault. Talk is just sound. I want it in writing. I want my blood in writing to make sure I still exist after the echoes stop.

You cannot deny me this. A record. My proprietary right to pain. Propriety solves nearly everything, but not nearly as much as politeness.

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ENTRY # ????

I can do anything. That’s what they told me. What everyone has always told me, as if the question isn’t important, as if I’m so versatile I am all-purpose, yet have none; I have a use, but I am useless. I should know.

And no one bothers to talk about anything. They think I know. They think I can just read their minds, and so excuse them from the duty they have to everyone else, all human beings. Knowing doesn’t make me judge, and letting them off scot free doesn’t get me paid. Also, it’s frustrating, never being satisfied, knowing that encouragement doesn’t apply to me, because I have always invalidated the term. Frustrating in ways they’ll never know but think they understand. Actually, they don’t care. So they write me a check, give me a pat on the head. I’ve got my treats, what more could I want—what else could the performance have been for? I’ve learned it all already, how they sleep in the audience and think of how they could be wasting their time in some other way, in some other place. How they want to. Maddeningly, the only foresight they have is one that blinds me.

And so when you say this again at the outset of my journey, offer me the moon and stars at my fingertips, you know in your black hearts, you bastards, that I will go off the path and pick my flowers as you run ahead, through the tangled forest you know so well. The shortcuts you created. Gobble up my ancestors, leaving me distracted among the dandelions; sunny recollections that have no bearing on reality.

Nothing in my basket can pacify you, and I am bound by civility and common human trust. You didn’t look like wolves, your fangs covered by interest and opportunity. I was blind. Now I wish to be naïve again. I will trade my sight.

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ENTRY #????

Something wrong with the body politic? Oh no, it’s delicious. Non est super terram potestas quae comparetur ei.1

It is the universal Ourobouros, like a snake devouring itself, poisoning every inch in the self-destruct sequence. Autonomous fangs ripping through scaly armor, biting the hand that feeds it, like a rebellious dog. The snake is too busy eating to tell them lies anymore, purple belly, dusky underside writhing in a self-induced stomachache. Bitten off far too much to chew.

Thought its own tail end might sneak up on itself, mistaking movement for menace. Now it chokes under and inside the weight of its own industrious strangling.

Can’t spit it out and admit defeat, the poison already seeping through every heart. They will take you down with them, enclose you in the supernova firefall. Meanwhile, we will have tea (and wait for sunrise). It is just bellum omnium contra omnes2, and so we should not be worried.

Had the snake not struck, this wouldn’t have happened. It wanted to live too high, like Daidalos, and now destroys its prodigal son. Neglected the tail too long, dragging it through dust, and the tail got burned, twitched in waves along the rim. To wit: down came the rain, in blazing color. Reflected in every eye.

----- 1. “There is no power on earth that compares with it”—a quotation from Job 41:25 . Used in Hobbes’ work Leviathan written during the English Civil War about the necessity of a strong central authority to avoid dissent and civil unrest.

2. “The war of all against all” Hobbes/Leviathan again on the “natural state” of humanity prior to their social contract with governance.